


Price to Pay

by dedicatedfollower467



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Immortality, Sad Ending, possible future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-04
Updated: 2017-08-04
Packaged: 2018-12-10 21:47:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11700513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dedicatedfollower467/pseuds/dedicatedfollower467
Summary: Vecna isn't dead. And so long as that is true, neither is Vax. Not even if his world dies around him.





	Price to Pay

**Author's Note:**

> Short, unbeta'd ficlet because everyone's so upset about Vax dying when Vax living could be so much worse.

Vecna isn’t dead.

Vax can feel his presence like a scalding wind on his face, a burning sensation in his breastbone, a vicious tug in the back of his mind that says “come, come, come,” urging him to go, to finish, to complete his duty.

It’s a searing pain that pulls him from the darkness of the void and back into his naked, aching body, new scars crisscrossing his body as pitch black feathers, again, and again, and again, incessantly.

Vecna isn’t dead. Everyone else seems to be, though.

Everyone, that is, except Vax.

He didn’t have to watch Vox Machina fall around him. Now he can’t decide whether it’s a blessing or a curse. Would he have found closure, if he’d watched Keyleth fall? If he could have seen the life as it left his twin’s eyes, the light of Pelor fleeing?

He doesn’t really think so. The eternal flame would still burn in his chest, yanking him, over and over, back towards Vecna. Because the Raven Queen’s blessing won’t let him die.

Vax doesn’t have any Prime Trammels left. They were destroyed - bits of divinity, destroyed by the power and cruelty of Vecna. Vox Machina failed, and they paid the price of their failure.

He knows he doesn’t have a single chance in all Nine Hells of bringing Vecna down alone. So does his Queen. And yet when he falls in battle, the next day, he rises; wearied and heart-sore and unwilling to go on.

For a few weeks he tried just ignoring the pull. The fifth time he’d risen alone in an unfamiliar clearing, after forcing himself to cleave Keyleth’s head from her undead body and watch the spinning red hair fall to the ground, he’d just left. Ran away to Ank’Harel, tried to blend in, tried to numb himself with drugs and alcohol.

But everything he tasted turned to ash in his mouth, every inhale of smoke released in a useless cloud of soot, every sip of liquor evaporating on his tongue. And the pain in his body increased a thousandfold, until he could not stop himself from standing and struggling slowly towards Vecna.

Once he decided to simply walk across the bottom of the ocean. Because he could. Because taking so long would at least delay the inevitable. He didn’t have to breathe.

Vax knows that he is changing; falling out of the legend of Vox Machina, a band of unflinching heroes, and into the horror story of a specter, a relentless, cursed entity of vengeance that will stop at nothing to see Vecna defeated.

Yes, Vax wants to see Vecna defeated, if only because when Vecna is gone, then it will finally, finally be over.

This was not the bargain he made, nor the price he expected to pay. But this is the path he has set his feet upon, and even the Raven Queen’s fate-touched cannot veer from the road of destiny.

Not even if it won’t kill him.


End file.
